Horde
We need to resist. It rushes from my lips
outside the club despite the impossibility
of we its presumptions the fracture
across its cloud which makes group chat
a hailstorm of full stops. Some of us have six legs
some two hundred. Plenty can’t stand each other.
Rainbows the physicist explains don’t exist
outside the eye as objects. When you move
toward one it slips away. When one trembles
it’s you that’s shivering. We are built from coat hangers
storm light and whatever we carry in our pockets.
The drag queen’s wedding dress of tissues and receipts
is highly flammable. It’s not enough for two queers
to have both been shut inside the sly apparatus of shame
to have both waited like umbrellas for practised hands
to slide along the sticks of our bodies
so our heads spring open. Not everyone wants to be
the beetle that wears exclamation marks on its wings.
It’s not a collective dream the western where cowboys
whip out glue guns and fix each other badly so they have
to do it again. We’ve been spat out of too many we’s
each loneliness a different colour. Anyway I still pray
to the god of pavements we can dance together
beside a police car’s flashing disco of blue.
And there are always the lies of memory.
My first Pride was twenty years back but the crowd
is still here and I feel it we share a craving
greedy commas with our tongues hanging out
ready to scoop up everyone.